Announcing New Updates to MariaDB SkySQL

The best way to experience MariaDB in the cloud is through MariaDB SkySQL, our fully managed database-as-a-service (DBaaS). We’ve released several new enhancements to SkySQL that deliver additional functionality and features that you won’t find in any other cloud database.

MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.5 GA

SkySQL now supports the most recent, major version of MariaDB Enterprise Server. MariaDB Enterprise Server extends the capabilities of the widely-deployed MariaDB Community Server with enterprise-focused advanced features and optimized builds for production environments.

Customers can now choose to deploy either MariaDB Enterprise Server version 10.4 or 10.5 GA. The option of MariaDB Enterprise Server 10.5 delivers expanded JSON support, expanded temporal table support, and a rewrite of the InnoDB storage engine. We’ve also added a Technical Preview of MariaDB for distributed SQL based on the recently released Xpand smart engine, part of MariaDB Platform X5. At this time, Xpand in SkySQL uses a single MariaDB Enterprise Server as a front-end to three to seven MariaDB Xpand nodes to deliver distributed SQL with high availability (HA) and fault tolerance to meet the needs of enterprise transactional workloads.

Workload Analysis

MariaDB Workload Analysis is the result of years of work from our machine learning team to build a deep learning model to understand the operating patterns of your databases running on SkySQL. You can now enable Workload Analysis on your transactional workloads running in SkySQL. Workload Analysis is available as a Technical Preview.

Once a customer enables Workload Analysis using simple menu clicks, the process to collect, learn and generate a model begins. It works by applying thousands of observations per week to a deep learning model to identify discrete workload patterns. Workload Analysis is the precursor to enabling automation in SkySQL.

More Options, Greater Control

We’ve also added support for high-memory instances and a greater range of transactional storage capacities in SkySQL. Where disk IOPS are tied to the size of transactional storage, these new options equate to increased ability to meet the needs of demanding workloads.

We added more fine-grained operational controls to better analyze estimated charges for your account. If you wish to reduce your production footprint, you can now stop or delete a service. Note that while a service is stopped, you are charged for storage.

Support for stopping a service has been added based on requests from customers that have spiky workloads. For example, if you run an analytical workload once in a month on a fairly large system you can save money by stopping the database service when it is not needed and starting it when needed.

We’ve also increased the capabilities of the SkySQL Configuration Manager, including more configurable variables and the ability to configure the MaxScale load balancer in Primary/Replica configurations of MariaDB Platform for Transactions.

These features can provide benefits both for production and for testing. Where some production applications run only once per month for batch processing, SkySQL enables you to stand up this capacity on demand, then stop the service until it is needed next month. The combination of SkySQL’s range of high-memory instance sizes and new Enterprise Server and MaxScale tunable configuration enables you to match your workload requirements, or scale up or down, to meet the demands of your development, test and production cycle.

Get Started with SkySQL

We’re excited to have you try out the newest features and options in SkySQL! Now is a good time to explore what you can do with SkySQL – get started today!

More Information is available at:

SkySQL July 2020 Release Notes

SkySQL Documentation

Get Started with SkySQL